School Vouchers Suffer Rebuke in Texas House: Legislators Didn't Take the Bribe

Great news from this week as captured by Jef Rouner in Reform Austin. Now the Texas Senate and House Conference Committee have to hash it out, but hopefully vouchers are dead in Texas. Vouchers that result in the privatization of public education—with hard-earned, taxpayer dollars subsidizing private school tuitions—are a good example of how politicians come into power to actually not defend the public interest or the common good. 

It's even more insidious than this as noted here below:

"Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn through a network of powerful PACs, has already proven that they are willing to pressure members of the legislature that they feel are not adequately conservative."

Do view this important, must-see CNN documentary titled, "Deep in the Pockets of Texas." It fills you in on what you need to know about the undue influence of oil money, specifically Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, on ultra-conservative Texas politics. It’s very much worth viewing if you’ve not already seen it.

Relatedly, also read Rouner's March 22, 2023 piece titled, "School Choice Bill Offers Rural Districts $10,000/Student Bribe." This of course means that Texas Republican House members couldn't be bribed. Here is a great example of "interest convergence" between black, brown and mostly-white rural legislators that helps save public schools year after year as these proposals have come up.

Texans must now vote these privatizers who secure public office out of power at the ballot box. 

-Angela Valenzuela

School Vouchers Suffer Rebuke in Texas House

BY

 JEF ROUNER

 -

APRIL 6, 2023

|

Governor Greg Abbott’s quest to institute a school voucher system in the state was dealt a serious blow in the Texas House of Representatives on Thursday. An amendment banning the legislature from funding vouchers comfortably passed during budget talks.

The amendment was submitted by State Rep. Abel Herrero (D-Robstown), and it immediately drew several Republican supporters. It included provisions banning state funds for any voucher-like program, including Abbott’s Education Savings Accounts. While vouchers could still be passed, they won’t have any money provided under this amendment. That’s a problem considering the cost is easily $1 billion and climbing.

The final vote was 86-52, with 24 Republicans supporting the measure. This is the second time Herrero has prevailed, having passed a similar amendment in the last session. While he had less support this time around, the comfortable margin of passage indicates that the voucher system could have trouble surviving the current session.

Meanwhile, the Texas Senate is expected to move ahead approving the Education Savings Accounts. These would provide up to $8,000 per student of taxpayer money that would be used for private, mostly religious, schools. Passing a voucher system has been a major far-right conservative priority nationwide and a personal project of the governor, who spent weeks touring the country drumming up support. His rallies for vouchers took an often overtly religious tone, further indicating that the push for vouchers was ideologically driven against secular education rather than on student performance and resources.

As expected, much of the support for the amendment came from rural Republicans. Texas State Sen Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) has tried to woo rural support by offering districts with 20,000 students or fewer a $10,000 per student stipend, an act that was called out as blatant politicking by Democrats on the education committee. During hearings, Creighton dodged questions about why large urban school districts should suffer the loss of enrollment allotments alone, as well as questions about oversight regarding possible price gouging from private institutions. The stipend would expire after two years.

The possibility of rural schools suffering losses in funding to pay for the vouchers doesn’t seem to have deterred the Senate, who is still expected to pass a budget including the vouchers.

Now, it will come down to a fight. If Republicans hold firm in the House, the voucher measure is off the table until at least 2025. The far-right portion of the Texas Republican Party, often funded by oil moguls Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn through a network of powerful PACs, has already proven that they are willing to pressure members of the legislature that they feel are not adequately conservative, particularly when it comes to amendment that Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi doesn’t like.

That said, it looks like vouchers simply don’t have the votes to pass in the Texas House. What this will do for the billions of dollars currently being debated in the state legislature thanks to a record-breaking budget surplus is anyone’s guess. Whatever happens, there is still a long way to go until Texas has her new budget passed.

Important, must-see CNN documentary titled, "Deep in the Pockets of Texas"

Students, Friends, and Colleagues:

Re-posting this important CNN documentary titled, "Deep in the Pockets of Texas," that might be something to do on this blistery cold day in Texas. 

It's illuminating, to say the least, about the rightward shift of Texas Republican party politics—out of step, incidentally, with most Texans and the nation.

It's about "policy for sale" via the bankrolling of campaigns of extremist candidates—many of them, nobodies—who get funding pending their passage of a litmus test regarding just how much they oppose gays, transgender kids, women's reproductive freedom, and other signature issues of the  republican right in Texas. To wit, according to a June 2, 2022 Navigator poll, Hispanics, who are stereotyped as conservative on such matters as abortion are largely pro-choice (61%) as opposed to pro-life (29%)—8 percent undecided.

Really wealthy evangelical white people on a mission are behind this. Wealthy people. We totally need to reform all this very influential dark money in politics. This begins with voting, as well as the passage of laws that open up the vote to all Texans.

This is the long game. A first step for me today is supporting Blue Texas that represents a collaboration between Power the Vote the proved influential in Georgia, and Every State Blue that has inspired grassroots efforts, providing resources to state legislative nominees together with resources to secure the vote in every district everywhere. Particularly with a great ground strategy, there is always hope. Plus, we really have no choice but to organize.

-Angela Valenzuela

@powerthevote

 

Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy 

Public Education and Replace It With 

Christian Schools

Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools by Diane Ravitch

Posting this piece by Diane Ravitch together with the actual, must-see CNN documentary titled "Deep in the Pockets of Texas" that's illuminating, to say the least, about the rightward shift of Texas Republican party politics.

School vouchers will be an important item in the next legislative session, by the way. 

And yes, democracy is on the ballot in November.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools

CNN posted an important article about two billionaires in Texas who are spending heavily to push state politics to the extreme right fringes on social issues. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks despise gays, love guns, and preach a version of Christianity that is suffused with hate, not love or charity or kindness. Above all, they aim to destroy public education, which they see as the root of America’s cultural decline.

If you read one article today, make it this one. It explains the drive for vouchers for religious schools. What Dunn and Wilks want is not “choice,” but indoctrination into their selfish, bumigored world view.

CNN’s investigative team writes:

Gun owners allowed to carry handguns without permits or training. Parents of transgender children facing investigation by state officials. Women forced to drive hours out-of-state to access abortion.

This is Texas now: While the Lone Star State has long been a bastion of Republican politics, new laws and policies have taken Texas further to the right in recent years than it has been in decades.

Elected officials and political observers in the state say a major factor in the transformation can be traced back to West Texas. Two billionaire oil and fracking magnates from the region, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have quietly bankrolled some of Texas’ most far-right political candidates — helping reshape the state’s Republican Party in their worldview…

Critics, and even some former associates, say that Dunn and Wilks demand loyalty from the candidates they back, punishing even deeply conservative legislators who cross them by bankrolling primary challengers. Kel Seliger, a longtime Republican state senator from Amarillo who has clashed with the billionaires, said their influence has made Austin feel a little like Moscow.

“It is a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” Seliger said. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it…”

Former associates of Dunn and Wilks who spoke to CNN said the billionaires are both especially focused on education issues, and their ultimate goal is to replace public education with private, Christian schooling. Wilks is a pastor at the church his father founded, and Dunn preaches at the church his family attends. In their sermons, they paint a picture of a nation under siege from liberal ideas…

Dunn and Wilks have been less successful in the 2022 primary elections than in past years: Almost all of the GOP legislative incumbents opposed by Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee primarily funded by the duo, won their primaries this spring, and the group spent millions of dollars supporting a far-right opponent to Gov. Greg Abbott who lost by a wide margin.

But experts say the billionaires’ recent struggles are in part a symptom of their past success: Many of the candidates they’re challenging from the right, from Abbott down, have embraced more and more conservative positions, on issues from transgender rights to guns to voting.

“They dragged all the moderate candidates to the hard right in order to keep from losing,” said Bud Kennedy, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper who’s covered 18 sessions of the Texas legislature…

People who’ve worked with Wilks and Dunn say they share an ultimate goal: replacing much of public education in Texas with private Christian schools. Now, educators and students are feeling the impact of that conservative ideology on the state’s school system.

Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar, joined Farris Wilks on a 2015 Christian speaking tour organized by his brother-in-law and said she spoke at events he attended. She described the fracking magnate as “very quiet” but approachable: “You would look at him and you would never think that he was a billionaire,” she said.

But Burton said that after a year of hearing Wilks’ ideology on the speaking circuit, she became disillusioned by the single-mindedness of his conservatism.

“The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,” she said of Wilks. “And rebuild it the way God intended education to be.”

In sermons, Dunn and Wilks have advocated for religious influence in schooling. “When the Bible plainly teaches one thing and our culture teaches another, what do our children need to know what to do?” Wilks asks in one sermon from 2013.

Dunn, Wilks and the groups and politicians they both fund have been raising alarms about liberal ideas in the classroom, targeting teachers and school administrators they see as too progressive. The billionaires have especially focused on critical race theory, in what critics see as an attempt to use it as a scapegoat to break voters’ trust in public schooling.

In the summer of 2020, James Whitfield, the first Black principal of the mostly White Colleyville Heritage High School in the Dallas suburbs, penned a heartfelt, early-morning email in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, encouraging his school to “not grow weary in the battle against systemic racism.”

The backlash came months later. Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate whose campaign had been backed by a group that received its largest donations from Dunn and organizations he funded, accused Whitfield during a school board meeting last year of “encouraging all members of our community to become revolutionaries” and “encouraging the destruction and disruption of our district.” The board placed Whitfield on leave, and later voted not to renew his contract. He agreed to resign after coming to a settlement with the district. Clark did not respond to a request for comment.

Whitfield said he saw the rhetoric pushed by Dunn and Wilks as a major cause of his being pushed out.

“They want to disrupt and destroy public schools, because they would much rather have schools that are faith-based,” Whitfield said. “We know what has happened over the course of history in our country, and if we can’t teach that, then what do you want me to do?”

Meanwhile, the legislature has also been taking on the discussion of race in classrooms, passing a bill last year that bans schools from making teachers “discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The legislation was designed to keep critical race theory out of the classroom, according to Abbott, who signed the bill into law.

Some of the co-authors and sponsors of the bill and previous versions of the legislation received significant funding from Dunn and Wilks.

The billionaires “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” said Deuell, the former senator.

By the power of their money, these two billionaires are reshaping public policy in Texas to make it as narrow-minded and bigoted as they are. Their reactionary vision will indoctrinate students and crush the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn.

If you live in Texas, vote for Beto O’Rourke for Governor, Mike Collier for Lt. Governor, and for legislators who support public schools.